


Dinner Date

by ArsenicInYourPudding



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Birthday fic for Nika, Clint and Natasha may or may not be a thing, Gen, I'm Sorry, augh this is late, use your discretion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 06:58:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/647828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArsenicInYourPudding/pseuds/ArsenicInYourPudding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The best way to grieve is often with good food and good company. Clint and Natasha know the value of both, and take Steve along with them. Birthday fic for a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dinner Date

**Author's Note:**

> So, augh, this is late by about three days, so very sorry Nika. D: On the upside, happy birthday, kiddo! :D Captain Steve Rogers, as requested, along with Clint and Natasha because Clint is my baby and Natasha comes along to keep him out of trouble. Sort of. When she feels like it.

The SHIELD barracks reminded him of the hospital.

Not the infirmary on the Helicarrier, or the medical facilities at SHIELD HQ, they were more reminiscent of Stark’s laboratories than any hospital he’d been in before The Crash. The barracks felt more like the hospital when he was a kid, with the white walls and thin mattresses and people coming and going at odd hours of the night. It was comforting and depressing at the same time, laying in his bunk and listening to the quiet noise around his quarters.

If he closed his eyes and imagined hard enough, he could remember the feeling of his mom sitting next to his hospital bed, stroking his hair and talking quietly about her day to help him fall asleep until the doctor could see him. He could hear her humming under her breath, could smell the cough syrup and the rose scented perfume that she was trying to stretch out with rubbing alcohol.

And inevitably, as soon as he made it back to when he was ten years old and everyone he loved was still with him, someone would knock, and the illusion would be shattered.

Steve swung his legs off his bunk and sat up, lingering for a minute before standing and shuffling to the door. Instead of Fury, or anyone who he might have actually wanted to talk to, he found Hawkeye filling the space his door had vacated, holding a large duffel bag in his left hand. Mirrored aviators didn’t quite hide the black eye blooming against his right cheek, and his lip was split and scabbed. His tongue flicked out to lick at the scab and Steve blinked expectantly to cover up his staring. “Can I help you, Agent Barton?”

The older man—and physiologically he was older, in his thirties at least—made an unhappy noise in the back of his throat and frowned at Steve. “Hawkeye or Clint, Cap. I’m not an ‘agent’ anything. Not anymore.”

Irrationally, Steve was shocked. He felt his posture stiffen and his eyebrows draw downward, and as carefully as he could manage, he asked, “They discharged you?”

“Nah,” Clint said easily, grinning at him. “Leave of absence, plus all my vacation days I haven’t used. That handler situation is going to be a mess, and the less I’m present for, the better.” And there was the grief under the amused stretch of his lips, the anger turned inward, shards of glass in his ribcage that hurt every time he moved, that Steve was all too familiar with.

He closed his eyes, just for a second, and he could feel the icy howl of the Alpine wind whipping against him. When he opened his eyes again, Clint was leaned against the door frame, looking at him curiously. “Y’all right there, Cap,” he drawled, sharp eyes flicking over him with a trained accuracy.

“Yeah, fine,” Steve said, taking a deep breath to reassure himself that the air was still the warm humidity of mid-summer New York. “Was that all you wanted?”

“No, actually,” Clint said, jolting back to his original train of thought. He adjusted the bag in his palm and glanced down the hallway. “Tash—Ah, Black Widow wanted to know if you’d eaten yet. Wanted to invite you to join us. Y’know, if you wanted to.”

“Eat where,” Steve asked cautiously. He hadn’t eaten, not since the shawarma excursion four hours earlier, and with his metabolism, that was a long time. But the prospect of sharing such friendly settings with Black Widow and Hawkeye, assassins who lived and died by a moral code so much different than his own, made him uneasy.

The archer shrugged, the motion seeming to ripple through every muscle in his body. “It varies. She picks something, I pick something, we thumb wrestle for it.”

“I… People still thumb wrestle?”

Clint faltered. “…Yes?”

“I mean, it was something to do in the camps. Kept the boredom from getting too bad.” Steve shook his head. “Didn’t know it was still around.”

“Oh, it’s still around,” Clint chuckled. “I’ve broken my hand thumb wrestling with people. Fun times all around.” At Steve’s stunned look, Clint grinned. “When I play, I play to win.”

Steve shook himself and looked around the room a bit, trying to find a logical reason to decline. “Well, I, uh… That’s, ah, very thoughtful, of the both of you, but I’m really… I don’t think…”

Clint grimaced. “Okay, I know it’s a really sudden thing, and you really have every reason to shut the door in my—“ he paused and glanced at his current position relative to the room—“well, _on_ my face, but regardless. SHIELD barracks suck, they’re lonely and too quiet and—Augh. What I’m trying to say is, we, Nat and I, would really like it if you joined us. Just this once.”

Steve rocked back on his left heel, glancing around the small room. It was bare, aside from a meager selection of just-too-tight clothing in the closet and a hand-knit blanket one of the other agents in the barracks had loaned him. (It had showed up, in true SHIELD fashion, in a featureless paper bag bearing a handwritten note in genderless script that only said _It’s easier to sleep with a blanket. Consider it a housewarming gift, in the hope you don’t end up staying._ The blanket itself was a surprisingly warm wool creation, somewhere between an afghan and a quilt, blocks in just about every shade of blue it was possible for yarn to be. Steve had taken to drawing the hands that he imagined might have made it on a cheap sketchpad he’d nicked from Supply, and someday he hoped he might give one to the blanket’s giver in thanks.)

While Steve wasn’t a stranger to loneliness, or even merely an acquaintance to it, it wasn’t pleasant company in the least.

“Alright, let me just—“ He moved for the wallet on the nightstand, and before he could really process what was happening, Clint had him by the wrist and was forcing him down the hallway to the elevator banks.

“Cap, if you think Nat’s going to let you pay, you’re nuts,” he said, shoving Steve into an elevator and producing a SHIELD ID out of ostensibly nowhere. He slid it through a card reader and punched the button for the ground floor. “It’s totally our treat, don’t argue.”

-x-x-x-

Natasha met them in SHIELD HQ’s spacious lobby, a dizzying maze of glass and steel and light that looked solid in columns against the granite floors. She smiled at Steve, approving but unsurprised, and turned to Clint. “I feel like Indian food,” she said without preamble, like she was daring him to argue.

“I feel like Captain Rogers should pick,” Clint countered, neatly throwing Steve between himself and the redhead. Natasha turned to him, one part surprised to three parts expectant, and planted a fist on her hip. Her posture couldn’t have screamed _I’m waiting_ better if she had a neon sign.

Steve shrunk back, feeling like he was caught suddenly in an argument years in the making. “I don’t really know what’s here anymore,” he said, looking between the two operatives.  

“Pick a kind of food you want, and we’ll handle the rest,” Natasha said. “Anything you want, Cap.”

He floundered, casting around for what might still be around. His mind landed on the taste of sweet cinnamon peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream, the sound of Bucky laughing and the distant clatter of the diner down the street from his apartment building. “Know somewhere with a good burger,” he asked finally. Clint grinned and looked at Natasha.

“Oh, do we ever,” he said enthusiastically. Steve watched a seconds-long nonverbal interaction bounce between them, faces contorting as though they had telepathic contact. Finally, Natasha seemed to catch his excitement and rolled her eyes before she turned to Steve.

“It’s a little bit of a drive, though,” Natasha warned, her lips twitching as she tried to stifle a smile. “It’s way out in Brooklyn.”

Part of Steve twisted a little, though whether in excitement or dread he couldn’t say. “That’s fine,” he said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been back.”

“Understatement of the century, Cap,” Clint laughed, leading the way out to a black SHIELD sedan parked on the curb. “I’ll drive.”

“Like hell you will,” Natasha scoffed, and in one fluid step, she was ahead of him, sliding around the front bumper and waving the keys mockingly in his face. “Backseat for you, my friend.”

“Man,” Clint whined, but nevertheless slunk back to the rear door.

“I can take the—“

Natasha gave him a _look_ over the roof of the car. “No you can’t, Cap. Besides, Clint is a twelve year old in a thirty two year old man’s body. He needs to learn maturity somehow.”

“Relegating me to the backseat all the time isn’t going to help,” Clint said, and when she turned her fed-up expression on him, he just stuck out his tongue and disappeared into the vehicle.

Natasha sighed. “I apologize profusely for my partner’s behavior.”

Steve chuckled. Outside work hours, the pair wasn’t as severe as he’d expected—still fierce, and he was certain they could pull the cool, calculated killers that he’d seen earlier that day out in a heartbeat, but for now they were relaxed, at ease with each other, and encouraging him to be the same. They’d almost devolved into comic relief, and he wasn’t sure it was entirely for his benefit. “You two seem very close,” he noted as he folded himself into the (surprisingly comfortable) passenger seat.

“We’ve been working together for… Clint, how long have we been working together,” Natasha asked the rear view mirror, sliding out into traffic. Her thin, manicured hands gripped the wheel like it was made of crystal, a far-cry from the bloodied weapons she’d wielded next to Steve earlier.

“Nine years on March 18th,” Clint supplied, leaning one elbow on each of the front seats.

“And he gets me something every year,” Natasha groused. One hand reached up by her shoulder to ruffle his hair fondly, and he swatted her away with a strangled sound somewhere between a laugh and a whine. “I swear,” she said to Steve, rolling her hand through the air in a lazy commiserating gesture, “it’s like he thinks we’re married or something.”

Clint stared at her, his mouth stretched in a theatrically stricken O. “We’re not married,” he gasped. “We’ve been living in sin all this time and you didn’t even think to let me _know_? Oh, what will my _mother_ say? I can never go home now—you’ve _ruined_ me!”

Natasha snickered. “You did that to yourself _long_ before I got here, I’ve just been encouraging you because it’s fun to watch you get in trouble.”

Clint grinned at her, but it was off-kilter just a bit, and Steve could tell that something had hauled him back into the mournful thoughts he was trying to stave off. “You mentioned you were taking a leave of absence,” Steve said, and in the back of his mind he could see Peggy coming to drag him out of the bottom of a bottle that wasn’t doing anything. “Any travel plans?”

It was a shot in the dark, Steve knew even as it left his mouth, and yet Clint brightened a little bit and sat up straighter. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Amazon,” he said, leaning against the back of the driver’s seat so he could look Steve in the eye with minimal twisting for both parties. “I was thinking about backpacking through the rainforest, seeing how far I could get before I get hit with some kind of poison dart.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “It’s his personal mission to have a near death experience in every country on earth,” she explained, her voice completely monotone. “It gets so annoying, you have no idea.”

“I’m up to eighty seven countries,” Clint said, with all the proud excitement of a ten year old telling someone about his frog collection. “And that’s not even including the ones that don’t exist anymore.”

“One of _those_ is actually how he met me,” Natasha laughed, navigating the chaos of the clean-up crews around Manhattan with the grace of someone who has seen so much worse. She turned and favored Steve with an approving smile. “I think you’re actually the only person I’ve ever worked with who I didn’t end up immediately physically assaulting.”

“Well—“

“No, I punched Fury in the face after he assigned me to my first handler.”

Steve stared at her. She smiled serenely back at him. In the backseat, Clint burst into laughter.

“In her defense, he was an idiot.”

“Fury, or the handler?”

Natasha groaned, letting her head fall forward toward the wheel. “Both of them. All of them,” she said, and her expression as she shook her hair out of her face told Steve the intelligence of her colleagues was a perpetual issue.

“She actually came storming into my quarters after she got back,” Clint said, “woke me up and said, ‘Everyone in the world is an idiot except for me,’ and then kicked me out of bed so she could sleep there.”

“And that incident has defined our partnership ever since.”

-x-x-x-

The diner was a blend of familiar and strange, the structure exactly how Steve had left it but the décor much changed, with new paint and new pictures and a bank of flashy pinball machines that had never been there when Steve was young. “I can’t believe they’re still in business,” he said, looking around with something close to reverent awe.

“Phil found it, trying to find your old apartment building. He brought us both here all the time, when we had an op go bad, or just plain had a bad day,” Clint explained, sipping on the straw of a thick chocolate milkshake. “I think it’s still the same family that owned it in the forties, too.”

Natasha plucked a stray french fry off of Clint’s mostly-empty plate, her teeth perfect white against her dark lipstick as she bit it in half. “Cap,” she started gently, reaching around Steve’s plate to settle her hand over his.

“Steve,” he said quietly, with a small, brittle smile. The nickname, however affectionately bestowed, still brought to mind a sketch of a dancing monkey, in a sketchpad long lost to time and distance. “Please, call me Steve.”

She smiled, warm and fluid, and gave his fingers a squeeze. “Steve,” she began again. “I know Fury used the cards as a bargaining chip against you, and that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right, and even I disagree with it. But as much as I disagree, I know why.”

Steve stared at her blankly, waiting for her to elaborate on the colonel’s mysterious ways. “We needed you out there today,” she continued carefully, like she didn’t want to tread in the wrong place and end up crashing through the floor. “We needed you, and we needed you as a leader. Stark will never be emotionally equipped to lead a combat squad, Banner’s obviously out, and Thor…well, is Thor. Clint and I take orders, and we give instructions to stray civilians and junior agents who are shaking like rabbits, but we were shaken off our moorings and neither of us could’ve taken charge in a firefight. You were our only shot, and Fury knew that.”

“Losing people sucks,” Clint added, picking up where Natasha paused with seamless fluidity. “And you lost a _lot_ all at once when you came out of the ice. Which, y’know, okay, seventy years unconscious, that’s gonna happen, but that doesn’t make it any less sucky. But I guess Fury needed Captain America expedited back to full leader mode, and those trading cards did the trick.”

“Point being, SHIELD is manipulative, and they don’t fight fair. If you’re uncomfortable with that, please don’t stay. You have seventy years’ worth of interest on your accounts, that’s enough for a little traveling money, or to get yourself set up somewhere you don’t ever have to look at the shield or the costume ever again. No one would fault you for either.”

Clint laughed, a touch bitter. “Yeah, we’ve been tossed around the professional dryer enough to be used to it, but SHIELD’s methods can be a bit…hard to handle, initially. Seriously, get out while you can.”

Steve wavered. He remembered the silence of the barracks, the unending quiet of the exam room in medical before that, and nearly shudders—he hates the quiet. Maybe getting out _would_ be the best option. “Part of me is trying to ask ‘What would Coulson do’,” Steve admitted.

“He’d tell you to _get away_ ,” Clint insisted. “He’d have your flight booked and your luggage packed before you got out of medical. You’d be halfway around the world before SHIELD even knew you’d left the building.”

“While that may be a slight exaggeration,” Natasha said, with a long suffering shake of her head, “it’s not entirely inaccurate.”

The waitress came back with a bowl of peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream, two more milkshakes and another glass of iced tea. “Can I get you folks anything else,” she said, and Steve smiled and shook his head.

Clint took a thoughtful sip of his milkshake before holding the glass up to the center of the table. “To Agent Phil Coulson,” he intoned solemnly, “may he be corralling the paperwork of cherubs and pushing junior angels behind barricades, forever and ever, amen.”

“Here, here,” Natasha agreed, tapping her glass against his. Steve followed suit and picked up his fork. In the very edges of his peripheral vision, he saw a shadow stop just behind his shoulder.

“Agent Barton, I believe you have just described my idea of a perfect hell.”


End file.
